Are you addicted to voice acting? So am I! The primary purpose of this blog is to help voice actors learn, grow, and demystify some of the uncertainty surrounding the VO business. Through interviews, articles, surveys and polls, we can learn how to tackle the technical aspects of this profession - technique, business management, marketing, and more. Come join us, fellow addict.

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

AVA is back, and here's what you can expect

I never get tired of that one.

As you probably never once thought about until just now when you realized this is the first AVA article you've read in months, AVA was on a long hiatus when life decided it would first point and laugh at me while I struggled under a heavy load, then kicked my legs out from underneath me and laughed some more while I lay there with a dresser pinning me to the floor and slowly siphoning the air from my lungs. Rest assured such difficulties have since been dealt with.

The reality is, though my circumstances are now under my control, I still find myself, how you say, rather strapped for time. Some days I wake up at 6 AM and don't stop working until 11 PM, whether it's my day job, voice acting, writing, marketing, or perhaps contributing to this blog. Some days I also break down and binge half a season of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. because life is pain and I need to know if Daisy is actually an android, but I at least have the conscience to feel bad afterwards. For awhile I put AVA on the back burner to play dodge ball with life. Now that game is over, but I realize I'm standing in a sea of these bouncy red balls and every step threatens to slip me up.

I initially designed AVA to adhere to a very strict set of deadlines - one interview a month, one accent learned a month, two articles of varying nature a month. Working on publishing my first novel and growing my voice over business while also working close to full-time at a day job, I no longer have the time to stick by those deadlines. This is why AVA is now continuing - yay! - but under different, looser laws.

My main goal now is to update AVA at least once a month. It will largely be updated on the pretense of "whenever the blazes I feel like it." Super-savvy blog aficionados would probably jump in here to tell me how important it is to update regularly and pull in more readers, but that's not necessarily the intent of AVA. The point isn't to become a full-time blogger and start raking in the big bucks through ad revenue, it's to put useful tips and insight into the minds of the people who need it, and growing my blog is important, but not so crucial that I need to tack an extra hour of work onto my 17-hour work days.

I do have several interviews and collaborations planned for educational purposes, and Let's Learn Accents will continue as I will it. I also have a lot more articles planned, and a lot of these will come mostly from the heart rather than a place of guidance and counseling. You'll see what I mean when we get there.

I feel very compelled to continue with AVA because it can not only help others who want to get ahead in their voice over careers, but it gives me a reason to grow, to become more than I am, and if I don't have that, I'm nothing more than a statue. (If you can tell me what video game I'm referencing, I will bake a plate of cookies in your honor and then eat them because I have no self-control.) I have an article planned for how continuing to learn and grow is absolutely essential to staying ahead in this career, and AVA will help kick my butt into gear to do that.

I won't get into it here, but I spent about a year doing virtually nothing to bolster my voice acting or writing because life was busy playing Tetris with me, and because I suck at Tetris, I was constantly getting burdened with more and more T and L blocks while life just laughed and chucked 'em at me like the world's most abhorrent candy. Caramel hard candy, maybe, or candy corn. This is to say, I am chafing at the bit to breathe new life into my arts, and AVA's going to be a big part of that.

This is a really long-winded way of saying that AVA is back, just under looser rules but probably with better content, and also a vague, cryptic explanation for why I was gone. Look forward to the future because it will be bright, even if the future's articles don't arrive as quickly as they used to.

2 comments:

It's all good, James! Glad to hear that things are going stable. We all get that time when we need to unwind, or try to figure out that damnable Tetris block that comes out of place, in life! I'm guilty of it, too. Can't wait to see more from here. Take care, friend! :)